Diorex

First in a series responding to readers requests (if you have any requests/suggestions for discussion topics, please say so), lets talk about keywords.

First off, my philosophy on keywords is that anything can be valid as long as it converts at an appropriate rate to be profitable. So test even things that are just tangentially related to your field, who knows there might be a goldmine you have not yet discovered. If you are not tracking to the keyword level, then you are not paying very close attention. Tracking should be a major focus.

Second - match types. I start just about everything on broad match and then move the stuff that works to [Exact] match. I dont use “phrase” matching at all. I used to, but found it typically did not add incremental revenues. I set-up a report in Google to be sent at the first day of every month to show me all the match types from the previous month. I typically take the top 20-50 (depending on click volume) and make those exact match keywords.

Third - Number of keywords - I dont really care about many more than my top 30-50 keywords. Over time that number has grown steadily but it still relatively small. With spreadsheets and Adwords Editor there is almost no incremental cost to have 10,000 keywords vs just a few dozen. Keep the ones that work and kill the ones that do not work.

Fourth - negative keywords - use the monthly report from above to filter out things you dont want or that do not convert. I cannot sell my product anywhere other than the US. So searches for UK or Canadian or Austrailian “keyword” are wasted and I dont want to pay for them. Same thing with credit cards - you have to have one for me to get paid, so I negative match keywords like “no credit card” etc. Lastly there are some search terms that just will not ever convert regularly like “customer service” and “scam”. Get rid of what does not work for your over time. Save just a few dollars a day and that will add up to money in your pocket.

Five - iterations - dont forget plurals, misspellings, competitors brand names, URL’s and other things that will have lots of different ways to be searched for. (think www keyword com vs keyword.com vs keyword com and about 20 other URL variations some are obvious some will be seen through the monthly report)

Six - new keywords - I no longer pay for any keyword tools, they all pretty much were some variant of the overture tool or otherwise flawed in data provided. The overture tool is no longer anywhere as near as useful as it used to be. lately, the way I get keywords is to type in the premium keywords in a vertical and see the top 5-10 URL’s. I then go into the Google keyword suggestion tool and click on site-related keywords. Type in the URL’s of the big guys and be sure to check the box Include other pages linked from this site. Then just scroll to the bottom select all, rinse and repeat and save into a CSV. then wash against the keywords I already have in Adwords Editor and then hand check to make sure to eliminate the obviously wrong keywords. I can usually add 500-1000 keywords every time I do this. As Google’s tool learns it produces better results, so be sure to come back once a month. One account earns $500 a day from my Google Suggestions AdGroup and that excludes the keywords I have graduated out of there into other adgroups. Ignore Google’s volume, CPC and position guesses they are not even close both high and low.

Seven - Organization - I have Campaigns for broad match, exact match, misspelling, and Misc (google suggestions etc). In this way I can easily locate what I am looking for. Content always goes into its own Campaign. I dont mind putting related words in the same ad group, but anything getting any traction in the way of clicks gets put into a 1 keyword adgroup.

Eight - Match ad copy and landing pages to key ad groups - you can make subtle changes to landing pages that will barely touch conversion but that might significantly improve quality score and thus CPC. Try putting the keyword in the landing page title (not dynamically) or in the URL (either subdomains or interior URLs), or work it into the ad copy, even paying attention to plurals can make huge differences. Anymore, the little details are becoming more and more important.

That is everything I can think of in relation to keywords - a lot of rehashing and my personal opinion - your results may vary.

Recently launched a new campaign in Google for search only. A brand new URL that was recently purchased and being used in Google only with Content network turned off.

I did a search for the URL string in the Google results to see if the page had been indexed yet.

Strangely, there were 2 results. One for my domain and another for the domain ChamberofCommerce.com (slimeball is good anchor text methinks) which has nothing to do with the US Chamber of Commerce or any other local COC for that matter.

So I went to the page (I am not showing up on the page I linked to…) and found a long list of sponsored results for which my ad was showing up amongst them. No Ads by Google link or anything. Just some scraped content (everything I copied and pasted from the site I found on other scraper type sites…) and then a huge list of sponsored results…

I had never seen a Google Ad group with 10 ads so this immediately got my attention, since not only are my ads only running on the Google network, but they are not running on content..So I investigated further…

I right clicked on the ad and clicked properties:

hotkeys.com/leadtracking?id=…ask.com (appended so it fits on the scree) which was then followed by a huge string of numbers….

Ask.com…I don’t advertise on Ask and never plan too after several experiences where they were distributing my ads outside of the search traffic, through Clicksor ads. I am a little pissed at Google that they will syndicate my ads and then allow that entity to re-syndicate them.

I immediately contacted my Google rep and explained the situation. They investigated and responded that this ad was not being served by Google, rather that it was being served by Akamai, which was not at all affiliated with Google.

Google was adamant that this was not a Google ad despite the fact that it landed on the proper URL, even going so far as saying it was possible someone was running this and not charging me….

What I had not told Google was that since I had rotating ad copy, that my ad was showing up differently each time I hit the refresh button. I asked the rep to hit refresh and the response was “we are not serving this ad, but we will see if there is some way that someone could know to rotate your ads.”

Even with pretty convincing proof of Ask.com serving my Search Only ad in a content setting, Google was unable to accept it. Now Ask is probably more important to their business than I am (and who am I kidding, I am not gonna quit Google…) but even when shown a blatant example of them intentionally re-syndicating ads in an improper manner they just do not seem to care.

Overture feeds are the single biggest problem at Yahoo. Google’s largest issue is the parked pages and that they seem to think the quality of traffic from excite, ask, & myway is the same quality as you see from AOL or even the Google network itself. Yes, I know you can go Google only, but I have tested it and even with all the fraud and junk clicks I am still better off than otherwise.

Google - you recently gave us insight into Content, but I think you need to follow that up and give us insight into the search network. Let me know where my ads show, give me a way to track it without having to use Google Analytics, and allow me to opt out of anything in your network, or set proper bids for individual traffic sources and I will pay you far more than I do now, because I will be able to weed out what does not work and concentrate on getting as much of what does work as possible.

Unfortunately, search engines seem to be in a race to the bottom, and quality suffers. They are falling all over themselves to give syndication deals to crappy engines with huge fraud potential. Google states they want to be about quality user experience, but seems to fail to recognize that the most important users are those footing the bill, what about the advertisers experience?

Shoemoney has opened up his blog to guest posts, which not surprisingly turned into an opportunity to Spam a little.

I have no idea who Big Daddy Lawson is, but he writes an open ended glowing review of Miva - the former stink pile known as FindWhat.

He talks glowingly about his particular niche and how Miva gets him clicks for half price, then hints that Ringtones or Home Equity loans would be worth trying there. Then ends with it “being all about the Money”

Got me to thinking that I know not a soul who has ever received any kind of ROI from this company. I have used them at 4 different companies that spend over $1 million a year for search (most far more). Each time giving them a try, setting a very low budget, very low CPC’s and still getting my entire budget depleted within a few hours and always with no conversions, despite enough traffic to have generated several at a minimum.

Now some might say, I had a bad landing page or bad ad copy or that even my server might have had issues that day, Miva reps certainly tried to make that point. They even went so far as to claim that what works for the other engines is not likely to work at Miva, because the audience is a little more sophisticated.

The last time it happened, I pulled server logs and realized that I was billed for hundreds of clicks despite showing only a few visits from Miva. Miva countered that the visits are from partner sites and would show up differently on server logs. We had set-up a unique URL just for them for tracking purposes and that was the data…Bottom line they were fraudulent clicks, Miva knew it and was trying to gloss it over.

Then a few months later, I get an email from a guy at Miva with a memorable enough name that i recognized it immediately when I got another note 9 months later at my new company. He sent the same exact 3 paragraph email to me at 2 different companies, even with a fake datapoint being the exact same data with the name of the industry changed. Slimy. He signed it “The traffic speaks for itself and results don’t lie.” Which is exactly what i thought about when I read the post on shoe’s blog.

I had a long conversation with someone yesterday who did not realize that Click through rate is important. he made the comment “Even on google?”. This made me think that there are lots of naive new affiliate marketers out there who are gonna read this post on Shoe’s blog and go throw some money at Miva.

Please save your time and money.

Please!

Last night, while sitting in the bar at the W in New Orleans waiting for my wife to get dressed for a night out. I got to thinking about something I read on the plane ride here and realized how it applies to affiliate marketing. Pardon me if it does not come out crystal clear, it was much more lucid last night.

I dont agree with everything Seth Godin writes, but in his new book The Dip, I think there is some great hidden wisdom. For $10 or so, I have gotten my money’s worth.

I keep reading it, and taking away things from it that are very subtle. The underlying theme of the book is that if you cannot be the best at something in your world, then you either need to work harder or you need to quit and focus your energies on something where you have the ability to achieve greatness.

This applies to affiliate marketing. Too many of the people who I talk to are scattershot affiliate marketers. They do 4-5 different verticals, but they all seem to have hit a wall. They cannot seem to figure out how to get past there current level of income. (Many of these guys are earning well over $25k a month, but just cannot seem to scale..)

All of these guys tend to play in the tail of keywords. When I share my average CPC they gulp, and wonder how the heck I can make that work.

In my mind, the short (and thick) head is where the money is at. Sure you can get $.10 clicks and lots of them in the tail, and we pursue those too, but volume is a fraction of what you can get from the more expensive head terms. SEO_mike wrote about this a few days back in many of you guys favorite vertical.

Best advice I can give any budding affiliate marketer - dont be a sheep and follow the crowd. If you are running ringtones or blockbuster or whatever the flavor of the month is, you are not going to be that successful.

Pick a competitive but unknown industry. Go gangbusters on the top 5 keywords. Drive a lot of volume. Test the heck out of your landing pages and ad copy. Then cut out the networks that earn more than most of you realize and go direct to the merchant. Show them your volume, your desire to work directly with them, and dangle the prospect of even more volume if the payout is good enough. There is some relationship building involved, but the affiliate networks are getting rich because affiliate marketers are too lazy too negotiate directly with the ultimate buyer of the lead/sale.

Lots of people focus on ROI. Focus on total profit. Would you rather make $5.00 100 times a day and invest $500 a day to do that or make $1.50 1000 times a day, but invest $5000 a day. Overall return is lower, but the IRS and your banker will like you more with the lower ROI. (Chicks think total profit is sexier than ROI too…)

Hedge Fund managers would kill for 1% daily returns and affiliate marketers are turning their backs on 50% ROI’s, if you have the program but need cash to scale it, let me know I can solve that problem. The head is where the low margin low ROI profits are.

Direct relationships with the buyer of your traffic combined with the volume you get from head terms is where the obscene profits are.

Back to drinking…sorry if this was a jumbled mess….

Google wants your conversion data. If you are already voluntarily sharing this with them, shame on you.

Sure Google analytics, Webmaster Central or Website Optimizer are useful tools with powerful features that are not readily available anywhere else for free. But have you ever stopped to think about why Google is spending millions to bring you free services?

If you ask Google, you get the stock answer along the lines of : “With tools like this, we show webmasters how to more profitably spend money on Google and thus are willing to spend even more.” or some variation of this. They are very aggressive about inviting big spenders into these beta tools to help further optimize websites and thus potentially spend more.
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Content match is a minefield that many publishers never survive.

A few basic thoughts before we get started:

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I see no reason why every single keyword should not be in its own adgroup. Why every single ad copy should not have its own display URL. Or why each match type should not be tracked differently.

Yes, it is a pain to set-up. Yes it is anal. Yes it matters. It can mean tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year difference.

The difference between singular and plural keywords can be huge. It is not out of the realm of possibility for the plural version to be a home run, while at the same time the singular version of the keyword could be bleeding you dry. Or the broad match is getting killed and the exact match is a huge cash cow.
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You have probably heard the old saw about beware of the light at the end of the tunnel, it just might be a 10 ton locomotive heading at you.

This is how I am starting to think about paid search and Google.

Before I lay out my thinking, let me say that I do not think Google is going to kill paid search and arbitrage any time soon, but I strongly believe they will make it far less lucrative over time.
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